An integral part of medical training involves exposing students to hypothetical situations where they are expected to diagnose and treat patients. In such training sessions, actors, known as standard patients (“SPs”), are trained to exhibit certain “symptoms” and to respond appropriately to questions. A student is required to examine the SP within a certain time period, e.g., a 15 minute appointment, attempt to diagnose the SP's ailment and to propose a planned treatment. Through such a process, a student's clinical skills and “bed side manner” are assessed.
Typically, clinical skills testing is conducted in an office setting where each office is set up as an examination room with an SP suffering from an ailment. Each examination room is equipped with monitoring equipment, including audio, visual and time recording devices, so that the student's encounter with the SP can be monitored in real time by an evaluator, such as a teaching assistant or upper classperson, and preserved for evaluation at a later time by a faculty member. The monitoring equipment is typically controlled by an administrator in a central control center or by a technician in each room. When the student is ready to begin the examination of the SP, the administrator or technician begin recording and timing the encounter.
Typically, a testing session requires a student to examine separately several SP's in approximately 30-40 minute time slots. After each encounter with an SP, the student is required to complete a post encounter assessment that is specific to the SP's ailment or case. The post encounter assessment can include a multiple choice checklist, subjective/objective assessment plan (“SOAP”) notes, essay questions, or any combination thereof. In addition, the SP and, optionally, the evaluator also complete a post encounter assessment of the student, which can include a checklist specific to the case. Once the student and SP have completed their respective assessments, the student moves on to the next room on his or her schedule to examine another SP.
At the conclusion of the testing session, the post encounter assessments are collected and graded. The checklists, e.g., multiple choice exams, are objective and relatively easy to grade because they only require comparing the selected answer with a correct answer. Untrained personnel or a computer system can perform this task easily. Essay type answers are transmitted or forwarded to a skilled reviewer, typically a faculty member, for his or her evaluation and grading. Once the post encounter assessments have been graded, the results are communicated to the student.
While the above described testing process seems rather straightforward, logistically, it presents many challenges. For instance, prior to a testing session, the administrator must configure each examination room and schedule students, SPs and in some circumstances evaluators. In configuring one examination room for a testing session on a particular date, the administrator must select a case (ailment), schedule an SP trained to present that case, and for each 30 minute time slot in the testing session, schedule a student to be tested. The administrator must do this for each of the examination rooms, for each SP, and for each of the students to ensure that each student is scheduled to complete the rotation for the testing session. If the clinical office has 10 examination rooms, 20-60 SPs, and 100-170 students in a testing session, one can easily understand how this configuration process is excessively time consuming and labor intense. Changes to the configuration, e.g., if a student is unavailable to be tested on a particular date and must be rescheduled, are equally time consuming.
Moreover, the challenges do not cease at the preparation stage. During the testing session, the administrator (including his or her staff) must ensure that the proper pre and post encounter assessments are administered to the students and that each of the encounters is timed and recorded appropriately. The administrator must also collect the post encounter assessments and reset each of the examination rooms after each encounter so that the room is ready for the next student. Finally, the administrator must be sure that the students who appear for a test are those scheduled to be tested and that a student who enters a particular examination room at a particular time is in fact the student scheduled to be tested in that room and in that time slot. For example, if a student inadvertently enters an examination room for which that student has not been scheduled, then the post encounter assessments completed by that student could be mistakenly associated with another student. In addition, the student's mistake can cause other students to enter examination rooms to which they are not scheduled. In this situation, the administrator can easily lose track of the students' identities, which then compromises the testing session.
Finally, in the grading process, grading of the essay answers requires a faculty member to read, evaluate and grade a student's answer. This is not only difficult and time consuming, but also highly subjective, i.e., based on the reviewer's personal opinion. Thus, if more than one faculty member is grading student answers, the grades issued by one faculty member may not be comparable to those issued by another faculty member. If this is the case, the grade scores must be normalized, thereby adding yet another step to the grading process.
To alleviate some of these problems, electronic systems have been utilized to automate some of the tasks performed manually by the administrator and his or her staff. For example, the administrator can configure an examination room electronically by selecting a case and selecting the proper post encounter assessments via a computer terminal. Nevertheless, those systems still require the administrator to enter the name of a student for a particular time slot in a particular room for a particular testing session. Therefore, the task of scheduling or rescheduling SPs, students and optionally, evaluators, for a testing session remains unduly burdensome. In addition, none of the existing systems address the subjective nature of grading essay answers.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method for automatically managing a skills assessment center. The system should allow the administrator to configure rooms quickly and easily, and should also provide flexibility in assigning students to rooms for testing. The system should be easy to use and to implement. The present invention addresses such a need.